‘Bad-time Stories’ article by Phillip Adams , (The Weekend Australian Magazine March 13-14, 2010)
“Remember the once-upon-a-time time? When children were scared by fairy stories about giants and beanstalks and old crones with gingerbread cottages? The macabre Punch and Judy have long since given way to cinema and television and “childhood innocence” is an oxymoron. Thanks to screens big and little, kids are bombarded with brutal images pretty much as soon as they leave the labour ward. And marketers are well on the way to sexualising children before they start kindergarten.
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Did you know Helena Bonham Carter’s Mum is a Psychotherapist? And shares her Mother’s sympathetic view of bullies saying … “Everybody has a heart and some people’s hearts have just been really damaged and they’ve forgotten how to love or feel lovable. Anybody that tiny inside needs to make themselves feel bigger, so they put people down.”
Quote from Weekend Australian Newspaper Review 27-28 March.
Rock The Boat .
In the darkness little helpers gathered . spilling rich black ink into soft white sheets . tailoring picture books to fill empty spaces … a few lines from a poem. The poem comes to life through a very special little book. Special, because it’s been handwritten by a young soul and for the message the handwriting carries.
Many young people I meet don’t write because they believe or have been told their handwriting is too messy, spelling all wrong, stories too bad to tell; and no-one would want to hear them anyway. So I asked one of these young people if they’d like to hand write ‘Rock The Boat’ book. We’ve been meeting regularly for well over a year now. Papers shuffling back and forth across tables in parks, libraries, cafes and quiet nooks. I bring a supply of inky brush pens; paper soft and white; the Army of Ink drawings and stories. Each piece is published in its raw and authentic form, complete with scribbling out and spelling mistakes. We hope it will encourage others to put pen to paper too.
Did you know … books were never designed to stand on their tails. According to the very unique, Douglas Firth from Biblio Folio; “As more and more books were produced in the 13th and 14th centuries, storage problems caused a change from laying books on their back covers to standing them on their tails. This is now normal but little consideration has ever been given to the engineering modifications needed. A medieval binding will stand up for some time before the text block collapses due to its over engineered structure, but a modern dictionary, atlas etc with all its ‘binding refinements’ certainly will not. Ironically medieval bindings were stored lying down and modern bindings are stored standing!”
